In the tradition of Frederic Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt, William J. Baumol is a plainspoken economist who elegantly presents simple logic with huge implications. In “The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t,” he explains why the cost of labor-intensive industries — like health care and education — increases much more quickly than inflation. I highly recommend. More in my Sunday column.

3 Responses to “Health Care Costs Will Continue to Skyrocket”

To quote The Professor, what can’t go on forever, won’t. I think health care costs will eventually stop increasing and the key to that is the adoption of Obamacare death panels.

Let the government set the limits on what constitutes a minimum level of health care insurance and then let competition and medical innovation try and beat it. I have a friend who was just operated on by a robot. Who says you can’t have improvements in medical technology?

Look, Obamacare was designed to do one thing…break the US system within 10 years so the FedGov can swoop in and make a one-payer public system. At its core it is wage&price controls that will bankrupt private insurance…a dog’s breakfast of all the failures of past government market intervention rolled into a neat Trojan horse designated to increase cost and limit choice. They know exactly what they are doing.

Nixon should have been impeached for his wage&price control failure rather than Watergate.

I agree. Not advocating keeping Obamacare in it’s entirety, just some form of the “What we can afford to do” panels. This takes it out of the hands of the horrible, evil “for profit” capitalists and puts the onus directly on the government. As it is now, and if Obamacare is repealed, the narrative remains that grandma dies because the CEO of the insurance company wants the stock price up before he retires.

The health care issue isn’t going away. If Obamacare is repealed something like it or worse will take it’s place until single payer occurs. It’s been said that only the Democrats can fix welfare and only Republicans can fix health care. I’d like to see them get on that right away, because single payer is going to be a long cruel trip to an American NHS.